To impose coherence on the thousand or so boys of VC, the authorities had divided us all into “houses,” which further inculcated and naturalized the ideology of empire. I was a member of Kitchener House; other houses were Cromer, Frobisher, and Drake. Cairo VC was an altogether less posh school than its Alexandria parent, which had been in existence for three decades and had a much more imposing roster of students (King Hussein of Jordan, among others) and masters, and a very handsome spread of buildings and playing fields in the great Mediterranean summer capital. Our Shubra campus was makeshift, originally rented during the war years to accommodate an overflow of students from Alexandria, which was principally a boarding institution. Most of the boys were day students from Cairo, less upper class and I supposed less accomplished than those from Alexandria. The classrooms and assembly hall were dingy and cramped. A permanent cloud of dust seemed settled over the place, even though four tennis courts and several football fields gave us outdoor facilities of a lavishness I had not before encountered.
As I stood around waiting for the class to begin that first day, the desks gradually filled with chattering boys, each carrying an immense briefcase filled with books, pencils, and copybooks. As the only new boy I assumed I would be an outsider for months, so dense was the web of associations and habits binding my twenty-five classmates together, yet by the end of that first day I felt quite at home. Mr. Keith Gatley, our form teacher, was white-haired and portly, with an enormous scar traversing his entire face diagonally. Like the other Britishers there, Gatley was an Oxbridgean who either had been marooned in Egypt by the war or had come there after the war in the absence of decent employment at home. Most of the staff were celibate and rumored among the students to be depraved pederasts who were able to indulge their illicit appetites among the vast corp of servants and perhaps even the school’s younger boys. Gatley was referred to as “al-Khawal,” or “faggot,” his dreadful scar (it was rumored) being the result of a fight with a pimp whom (according to the same scurrilous report) Gatley had tried to cheat. Obviously there was no way of knowing if any of this was true.
I discovered most of this “background” during the first English class, which was devoted to Twelfth Night, a highly inappropriate play for coarse teenagers for whom “the music of love” conjured only the rhythmic sound of a masturbating hand. Gatley asked us to read aloud and explain various lines in the first scene but achieved only raucous laughter, incomprehensible gibberish, and horrendous Arabic obscenities presented as “classical” equivalents of what the Duke of Illyria was saying. All the scene’s “dying falls” and “entrances” and “abatement” were explicated with scarcely concealed lewdness, while Gatley, whose nearsighted gaze shielded him from most of the class’s gestures, nodded lethargic approval of and vague assent to what he thought he was hearing.
In a matter of hours, years of earnestly solemn education fell away from me as I joined in the ceaseless back and forth between the boys united in group solidarity as “wogs” confronting our variously comic and/or maimed teachers as cruel, impersonal, and authoritarian Englishmen. It was generally believed that most of the masters were war casualties who, in our totally unsympathetic view of them, deserved their twitches, limps, and spastic reactions. Near the end of the class Gatley suddenly stood up, his great belly protruding out from his tight shirt and stained baggy trousers and, awakened from his torpor, lurched toward two chattering students whose insouciance prevented them from seeing the disaster looming near them. I had never seen anything like it before: a wide-armed heavy-set man flailing wildly at two pocket-size boys, he landing an occasional blow while trying to keep from falling, they nimbly dancing out of his way screeching “No sir, don’t hit me sir” at the top of their voices, while the class gathered around the trouble zone, trying to divert his blows from the offending pair.
Gatley’s class was immediately followed by an hour of mathematics drummed into us by one Marcus Hinds, as wiry and nervous as Gatley was lumbering and phlegmatic. Mr. Hinds thought of himself as something of a wit, the evident sharpness of his mind given support by a caustic tongue that brooked no laziness or sloppy reasoning. At least algebra and geometry had a precision to them lacking in Gatley’s sentimental moonings about what to us was “foreign” poetry, so the class settled down to serious work in a matter of minutes. Yet Hinds’s silence turned out to be literally more punishing than Gatley’s lethargy. Equipped with a specially made extra-large blackboard eraser one of whose sides was lined with an inch-thick piece of wood, Hinds would descend on an offending student who may have been whispering to a neighbor or, an equally serious offense, was incapable of grasping an algebraic formula and start battering his head, shoulders, and hands with his painful weapon. It was my misfortune in the first class I had with Hinds to ask my neighbor George Kardouche which textbook of the three we carried we should be looking at: whereupon Hinds launched his eraser at me like a missile, a more efficient method than stalking to the back row and raining blows on me. My offense was relatively minor, and I was a new boy, hence the telegraphic punishment, which narrowly missed my left eye but raised an ugly purple welt on my cheek. Since no one had reacted to Hinds’s abuse I choked back my response and simply rubbed my sore cheek. Thus were the lines drawn between us and them.
For the first time in my life I was part of an unruly school group insofar as I was neither English nor from Egypt, and certainly was Arab. Between us and them, the pupils and teachers, existed an unbridgeable gulf. To the imported English staff we were viewed as either a distasteful job or as a group of delinquents to be punished anew each day.
A little pamphlet entitled The School Handbook immediately turned us into “natives.” Rule 1 stated categorically: “English is the language of the school. Anyone caught speaking other languages will be severely punished.” So Arabic became our haven, a criminalized discourse where we took refuge from the world of masters and complicit prefects and anglicized older boys who lorded it over us as enforcers of the hierarchy and its rules. Because of Rule 1 we spoke more, rather than less, Arabic, as an act of defiance against what seemed then, and seems even more so now, an arbitrary, ludicrously gratuitous symbol of their power. What I had formerly hidden at CSAC became a proud insurrectionary gesture, the power to speak Arabic and not be caught, or, more riskily, the use of Arabic words in class as a way of answering an academic question and attacking the teacher at the same time. Certain masters were especially vulnerable to this technique, preeminently a Mr. Maundrell, the unfortunate and bedraggled history teacher who may have been a victim of shell shock. A tremor animated his gnomic lethargy as he muttered facts about Tudor kings and Elizabethan customs before a basically unreceptive and callous group. In answer to one of his questions a student would begin by suavely mouthing an Arabic imprecation (“koss omak, sir”) immediately followed by a “loose” translation (“in other words, sir”) that had nothing to do with the foul phrase (“your mother’s c——t”). As the class roared their appreciation, Mr. Maundrell would jerk backward in fear and astonishment. We would also play “akher kilma” with him, repeating in unison the last word in every one of his sentences. “Elizabeth’s reign was notable for culture and exploration,” one of his typically torpid sentences, would draw a resounding chorus of the word “exploration” from us, which Maundrell would ignore for about six sentences, before exploding in a roar of shaking, spastic rage, which in turn drew delighted cheers from us. By the middle of the term he had given up trying to communicate, sitting sulkily in his chair mumbling about the regicide and Cromwell’s revolution.
Teachers were therefore judged either as weak (Maundrell and Mr. Hill, the geography master) or strong (Hinds, and occasionally Gatley), never for their academic performance. A small staff of locals handled the Arabic classes, which were divided into advanced, medium, and beginners, but so far as I could determine all but one of these teachers were held in contempt by the students, as much, I think, because they were plainly second-class citizens withi
n the school as because very few of us considered the study of Arabic poetry exemplified in dreadful patriotic encomia to King Farouk to be anything but the drivel it was. My teacher in the intermediate class was a Coptic gentleman known to us as Tewfik Effendi; his counterpart in the advanced group was Dab” Effendi, the one teacher whose profound commitment to the sanctity of the language earned him the respect, if not the love, of his class. Tewfik Effendi was a smarmy gentleman badly in need of extra cash; early on he determined somehow that I might be a candidate for “private lessons” and succeeded in insinuating himself into my mother’s good books, and thereby became a twice weekly visitor to our house as my tutor. After half a dozen inconsequential attempts to drill me in the complexities of grammar—resulting in more than twenty years of alienation from Arabic literature before I could return to it with some pleasure and enthusiasm—Tewfik Effendi and I spent our closeted hours chatting about, but never really studying, the books, the idea for him being to get his cash and his cup of coffee with biscuits served to him solemnly by Ahmed, our chief servant, and then leave for another doubtlessly as futile tutorial. Ahmed and I habitually made fun of Tewfik’s ritual demurral when the coffee and biscuits were served—“No, thank you, I’ve already had my afternoon coffee with my friends at Groppi’s,” the fashionable downtown café whose habitué he pretended unsuccessfully to be—and his then ritual acceptance of the goodies, which he slurped down and chomped with great gusto.
There was a great distortion underlying the Victoria College life, which I was unaware of at the time. The students were seen as paying members of some putative colonial elite that was being schooled in the ways of a British imperialism that had already expired, though we did not fully know it. We learned about English life and letters, the monarchy and Parliament, India and Africa, habits and idioms that we could never use in Egypt or, for that matter, anywhere else. Being and speaking Arabic were delinquent activities at VC, and accordingly we were never given proper instruction in our own language, history, culture, and geography. We were tested as if we were English boys, trailing behind an ill-defined and always out-of-reach goal from class to class, year to year, with our parents worrying along with us. I knew in my heart that Victoria College had irreversibly severed my links with my old life, and that the screen devised by my parents, the pretense of being American, was over, and that we all felt that we were inferiors pitted against a wounded colonial power that was dangerous and capable of inflicting harm on us, even as we seemed compelled to study its language and its culture as the dominant one in Egypt.
The incarnation of declining colonial authority was the headmaster, Mr. J. G. E. Price, whose forest of initials symbolized an affectation of pedigree and self-importance I’ve always since associated with the British. I do not know where he and my father had become acquaintances, but that link had perhaps something to do with his initial cordiality toward me. A short, compactly built man with a black brush mustache and a mechanical stride as he took his black terrier for walks around the playing fields, Price was a remote figure, partly because so much authority was delegated to teachers, prefects, and house masters and partly because he seemed to grow dramatically weaker with ill health until, after remaining hidden in his study for many weeks, he finally resigned.
By the end of my first month at the school, I had risen to a kind of bad eminence as a rabble-rousing troublemaker, talking in class, hobnobbing with other ringleaders of rebellion and disrespect, perpetually ready with an ironic or noncommittal answer, an attitude I regarded as a form of resistance to the British. Paradoxically, though, I was also riven with all sorts of anxiety about failure, was insecure in my suddenly too-masculine body, sexually repressed, and above all in steady fear of exposure and failure. The school’s bustle was formidable; with classes from eight-thirty until five-thirty or six, broken only by a lunch break and sports. This was followed by a long evening’s homework, regulated by a small thick notebook, dutifully bought at the school’s bookshop as a place to create a record of each day’s assignments. The curriculum, consisting of nine subjects—English, French, Arabic, math, history, geography, physics, chemistry, and biology—was enormously pressured. I was soon in a state of anxiety, feeling totally unprepared to meet all the deadlines and exam requirements.
One day early in the term I was caught throwing stones during the lunch break and immediately taken by a prefect with clammy hands to Price’s office for punishment. In a huge, indifferently furnished anteroom, Price’s secretary, a burly local whom we knew only as Mr. Lagnado, sat behind one of the desks busily typing away. The prefect whispered something to him, and I quickly found myself with him in front of Price’s oversize, empty desk in the next room. “What is it, Lagnado?” the ailing headmaster said sulkily, “what’s this boy doing here?” I was left in place as Lagnado walked around the desk while, like the prefect before him, he said something confidential in Price’s ear. “We can’t have that,” Price said firmly. “Come to the window, boy,” he said coldly to me. “Bend over. That’s it. All right, Lagnado.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Price give his man a long bamboo cane and, with Price holding me by the neck I saw Lagnado raise the vicious-looking whip and skillfully administer six of the best to my rear end.
Too physically weak to do the honors himself, Price subcontracted out to a local, who in turn did what he was told with neutral efficiency, the silent headmaster standing to one side nodding his head with each stroke. “That’s all, Said,” I was told by Price. “Get out and don’t misbehave again” were his valedictory words, and as I left his inner sanctum I passed Lagnado, who had slipped out before me and was back at his desk, again typing as if nothing had happened. The pain was dreadful. Lagnado was a burly fellow, and—perhaps to please his master, perhaps to humiliate an “Arab” (I had once heard him say to an Armenian boy who was dipping his bread in his gravy, “Ne mange pas comme les Arabes”), Lagnado being a Europeanized Eastern Jew—the beating had been truly harsh. But I felt it as what was to be expected from a wartime situation. A ruthless fury took over as I vowed to make “their” lives miserable, without getting caught, without allowing myself ever to get close to any of them, taking from them what they had to offer entirely my own way.
Although I now had a virtual schoolful of accomplices and allies, my parents’ rules and regimen still exercised their power. In part because of what was believed to be the salutary Dhour el Shweir experience of being tutored by Aziz Nasr in geometry the summer before, my parents decided that one way of getting me better adjusted to Victoria College’s stiff academic routine was to increase the number and kind of tutorials (“extra lessons,” we used to call them). Even though I did have a decent head for math and science, I was tutored in both math and physics, partly because my arithmetical skills were so far behind my father’s and my oldest sister’s. Huda Said, my older cousin George Said’s stunningly beautiful wife, volunteered for math; and for physics, my father dragooned a bright young Palestinian refugee studying at the American University of Cairo, Fouad Etayim. Huda and I got on famously, mainly talking about music, doing very little in the way of algebra, which I understood rather quickly. Fouad was a journalism major, companion-in-arms of my cousin Robert (also at AUC), and he seemed to be learning the material more or less concurrently with me. I recall many drab hours struggling over the uses of British Thermal Units (BTUs) in calculations of heat, but for me the interest of the hours spent with Fouad were in discussing with him the villainous state of Arab journalism, listening to his caustic wit deconstructing the empty rhetoric and bankrupt ideology of writers for the newspapers Ahram and Akhbar.
It was to Auntie Melia that I finally confided my rising tide of woes, my sense of lostness and confusion at school, the overwhelming language and other requirements, the punishing atmosphere, the discordant uses of tutorials, sports, piano lessons that kept me fruitlessly, aridly busy from morning to night, seven days a week, in dramatic contrast to the illicit pleasures of delinquency. It was all too m
uch for me, but Auntie Melia rose wonderfully to the occasion. “If you think of everything you must do as present before you, to be done all at once, you’ll cripple yourself. Time obliges you to do them in sequence, one at a time, and this,” she continued with the assurance of someone who had won the battle herself, “dissolves the burden almost entirely. You’re very clever and you will manage.” Her calm, almost affectless but somehow caring words have remained with me, surprisingly useful in times of sudden crisis and impending, albeit projected, disaster, as deadlines of all kinds have loomed before me. Her calmness and her authority had a positive effect, but unfortunately this was the last time that she and I talked together in confidence: her retirement from the American College was imminent, and after she left for her final move to Lebanon she was never again the same person.
It came only as a slight surprise that Auntie Melia was right, almost too much so. In a matter of two months I not only looked forward to school as an escape into a more manageable, less onerously demanding reality than the odd playacting at home (after I had been discovered as an illicit self-abuser, my parents’ gaze became even more suspicious, and my behavior and time still more subject to surveillance and chores). Middle Five One was by far the most complex social and, of course, academic situation I had ever negotiated, and in most respects I quite enjoyed its challenges. Academics were of little interest: there were no teachers of distinction or of obvious talent, although one, Mr. Whitman, a rather fastidious older man who taught Lower Five One, seemed uncommonly interested in classical music and persuaded me (and I then persuaded my parents) to lend him our recording of Strauss’s “Dance of the Seven Veils” for the classical music club, of which I was a very occasional member. Aside from that I existed in a state of alert consciousness, my former fears and anxieties lifting like an early-morning fog to reveal a landscape requiring the utmost attention to social and, in a primitive state, political details.